A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
